INDIANAPOLIS — Luck smiled on the Giants here last night, even if Chris Snee sneered at the mere premise.

The Giants could not have lived Super Bowl XLVI much more dangerously than they did, beating the Patriots 21-17, despite three fumbles — two of them recovered by teammates and the third negated by a crucial penalty on New England.

That might have seemed like a case of extremely good fortune to everyone else watching Super Bowl XLVI, but Snee said luck had nothing to do with it.

“I don’t believe in luck,” said the veteran guard, who fell on Ahmad Bradshaw’s fourth-quarter fumble to keep Big Blue alive. “What you call luck, I call hustle. We talked all week about being in the right place and being on the lookout for anything, and that’s what we did.”

Hustle had nothing to do with the first instance of the Giants averting disaster, though. That appeared to be all luck, as the Patriots’ recovery of a Victor Cruz fumble at the New England 11 was negated by a penalty for having an extra man on the field.

But Snee and several of his teammates insisted the other two ultimately blessed moments for the Giants — Hakeem Nicks’ fumble in the third quarter recovered by fullback Henry Hynoski and Bradshaw’s loose ball in the fourth — weren’t written in the stars.

“I like to look at it that preparation created our luck tonight, if you want to call it luck,” defensive end Dave Tollefson said. “We were going to be ready for anything tonight, because we had been drilled that way. We were going to be a team of opportunists, just like we’d been all year.”